


xenia

by onekisstotakewithme



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, I wrote this instead of studying for my classics final, Inspired by Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Other, Post-Canon, Post-War, Pre-OT3, Unexpected Visitors, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21715549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onekisstotakewithme/pseuds/onekisstotakewithme
Summary: He shows up on their front doorstep a stranger.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 7
Kudos: 83





	xenia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [daylight_angel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/daylight_angel/gifts), [flootzavut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flootzavut/gifts), [alleyesonthehindenburg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alleyesonthehindenburg/gifts).



He shows up on their front doorstep a stranger. 

His eyes are trickster-god blue, and surrounded by too many lines for a man of his age, and he smiles at her, tired and travel-worn, when she opens the door.

In one hand is a suitcase, the other a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers, and his shoulders are weighed down with invisible baggage he didn’t leave behind in his travels.

He crosses Peggy’s threshold and as he does, transforms from stranger to guest, his smile like an epiphany.

She asks nothing of him, asks nothing about his journey, just welcomes him inside, and shows him to his little guest room at the top of the stairs.

“Here,” she says, handing him a towel of off-blue. “You’ll probably want to clean up. And then you can come downstairs, and we’ll talk while we eat, alright?”

He nods, looking a little lost at sea, and he clings to her hospitality like a life preserver, for even in this foreign landscape, she is at once alien and familiar.

It reminds her, in this painful, awkward silence, that as much as he is a stranger to her, she is equally one to him.

 _And the stories and myths never prepare a person for reality_ , she thinks wryly as he goes into the bathroom, and she hears the lock click behind him, hears the shower start, and waits for a few seconds outside the door. 

“How goes it?” her husband inquires, sticking his head out of their daughter’s room.

She shrugs, a little helplessly, feeling for just a second as though there is some test she is expected to pass. “I thought he’d be…”

“Funnier? More annoying?” BJ asks with a smile, leaning in the doorway.

“Louder,” she says, looking at the door. 

BJ laughs, and walks over to kiss her forehead. “Let him settle in first, Peggy Jane. This is all new to him, remember?”

“It’s like when you first got home,” she admits. “Like meeting a stranger.”

He nods. “How’s he doing?”

“I’d ask,” she whispers, “but that would break the rules.”

The bathroom door opens again, and their guest steps out, a towel casually slung around his neck, his hair black and silver and plastered to his forehead, but his clothes are clean, and he looks… brighter, almost, larger than life and smelling like Peg’s shampoo.

“Dinner’s about ready,” BJ says to him. “When you are.”

At the dinner table, Peg watches their guest eat, watches him sniff his the first forkful of food he lifts to his mouth, as if testing for poison. 

When he catches her watching him, he raises an eyebrow, but stops doing it, clearly sure that he’s somehow offended her hospitality.

Only after he’s finished eating, and BJ has cleared away the plates, leaving them in the quiet dining room as two strangers, does he start to talk, and in earnest. 

His journey was long, he explains, and not without its perils, a hero’s journey of bad airline food and crying babies, but he tells the tale with relish (even if his eyes are lined with darkness).

And the stranger melts away with each wry grin, each honking laugh, and it dawns on Peggy, an epiphany: she could learn to like this man. 

With further prompting, he weaves tales of his own tiny seaside home, of dark forests and the things that lurk within, so different and yet so near to the same sea that beats on the shore outside.

His stories of his home are ancient, and well-worn, like the stories told over mended fishing nets by fishermen with rope-roughened hands.

As the night fades into darkness, Peggy brings out a bottle of cheap gin, only to find her husband and their guest poring over a series of polaroid photos when she returns to the dining room.

The older stories start to come out, stories of tricks played for both good and ill, and to hear them is to know them, to know the people in the stories, and to know the people telling them. 

Hawkeye kisses her cheek before he goes upstairs for the night, and gives her a radiant grin. “Night, PJ.”

BJ grimaces, but she just grins, and lets it slide.

Even once she and BJ have gone to bed, she can feel the power of Hawkeye’s presence in the house, a bit of a trickster spirit wrapping vines around her soul, and though their laughter is hushed by sheets and muffled in pillows, Peggy teases and torments, until finally she yields and welcomes her husband like a revered guest.

“What a hostess,” he’ll murmur later, stroking her hair. 

The next day dawns bright and early, and by the looks of it, none of the three of them are well-rested, but the three of them take Erin to the zoo, and then for ice cream, and even though Hawkeye is hesitant, Erin takes to him like a duck to water.

“She must get that from her mother,” Hawkeye says to her, as Erin insists on being carried on his shoulders.

“Her hospitality?” Peg asks teasingly, rubbing sunscreen onto BJ’s face.

“Her complete and utter lack of fear,” Hawkeye says in return, and the darkness lines his eyes again, but he’s distracted by Erin tugging on his hair with sticky-sweet fingers and dripping ice cream onto his nose.

She doesn’t ask what he means, just files it away to ponder later, and takes BJ’s hand in hers as they keep walking.

And something emboldens her to take Hawkeye’s hand too.

Miraculously, he doesn’t object. 

Back at the house, with Erin napping upstairs, Hawkeye helps Peg in the kitchen, the two of them preparing a feast in between stolen sips of good wine, and it feels like a ritual, a sacrament.

Hawkeye is animated, telling stories with exaggerated hand gestures, and she laughs so hard her ribs ache, her own stories spilling from her lips like a prayer, like supplication to a trickster god, proof that she is worthy to share his table.

They’re so distracted that the food burns, filling the kitchen with savoury-smelling smoke. 

“I think it's safe to say we ruined dinner,” she says, as she coughs, and the tears running down her cheeks aren’t entirely from the smoke. 

He just laughs, and says, “I happen to love a good burnt offering.”

And then she’s laughing too.

BJ finds both of them slumped on the floor in the hazy kitchen, giggling to themselves, and shakes his head. 

They end up eating Chinese food in the living room, and it’s the best dinner she’s had in years, though the three of them talk for so long that the food ends up quite cold by the time they actually eat it. 

Peggy is shockingly content, tipsy on good wine, talking and debating and laughing with Hawkeye and BJ, and she wonders, just briefly, if she’s known Hawkeye for twenty hours or twenty years.

She falls asleep on the couch, Hawkeye tugging a blanket up over her shoulder, and it is the reverse of how things should be, but it feels so right that she can’t bring herself to protest.

She wakes up the next morning, still on the couch, her neck stiff and the sunbeams warming her face, and from the couch, she can see into the kitchen, where Hawkeye stands at the stove, surrounded by brilliant light, accompanied by Erin.

There’s a glorious fragrance in the air, that she will soon learn is the smell of the much-revered French toast recipe, a Pierce family tradition, a gift that he delivers on a sunshine-yellow plate with an apologetic smile and a cup of coffee with cream and two spoonfuls of sugar, just the way she likes it.

“Thank you,” she says, and she’s rewarded with a grin, a real one.

She carries her plate through into the dining room, where she’s joined by BJ a few minutes later.

“You didn’t tell me,” she hisses over powdered sugar and cinnamon. 

“Didn’t tell you what?”

“How talented he is,” she says, and shakes her head in mock disappointment. 

He grins. “Maybe I like being your husband, and didn’t want you to upgrade to a new model.”

Any answer she could have is lost when Hawkeye walks in with Erin and two more plates.

“Uncle Hawkee, wanna try,” Erin insists, once she's in her spot of honor beside him. 

“What, the toast?” Hawk asks in return, grinning as he points to her plate. “What do you think that is, silly bean?”

“No, no, the cup.”

“You want to try my coffee?” he asks, and she nods.

“It’ll stunt your growth.”

“Whassat mean?”

“Means you’ll be short,” Hawkeye tells her. “Like your mom.”

“Very funny, Hawkeye,” Peggy says, her voice dry as she sips her coffee.

“Wanna try,” Erin insists.

“Alright, alright, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Hawkeye says, passing over the mug, but there’s that same trickster-god gleam in his eye.

Erin takes a sip, and then makes a face. “Yuck.”

“It’s an acquired taste,” Hawkeye says, and grins across the table at Peg. “Kinda like me.”

“Hawkeye, she’s smart, but she doesn’t know what ‘acquired’ means,” BJ says, rolling his eyes.

Peggy hides a grin into her coffee as they bicker, and it’s as though two years have been abruptly returned to her, with interest.

They’ve come up out of the underworld and into the daylight together, the three of them, as they sit at the kitchen table and trade jokes as though they’ve done it all their lives.

“Last day in paradise,” she says teasingly to Hawkeye as she and BJ do the dishes together. “What do you want to do with it?” 

Hawkeye passes over a dishtowel without being asked. “I was hoping to see the beach before I left.”

“Well lucky you, it’s a good day for it.”

It’s a gorgeous day, bright and sunny and shockingly warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky, and if Peggy ever believed in divine intervention it would be today.

After breakfast, they head down to the beach.

The waves are still shockingly cold, but the sand is scorching against the bottom of Peggy’s feet, and the sand is warm underneath her towel as she suns herself. 

Hawkeye takes to the water like a seal, splashing around with Erin and BJ, and even Peg isn’t immune to the siren’s call of the blue-green waves, gladly joining them in the water as the sun beats down on them. 

BJ’s ridiculous hat has somehow ended up on Erin’s head as Hawkeye gives her a piggyback ride through the shallow water, occasionally dipping below the waves and making her shriek with laughter.

BJ wraps his arms around Peggy’s waist, resting his chin on top of her head, and asks, very quietly, “Any regrets?”

“Not a one,” she answers honestly. “He’s… made himself right at home.”

“In California?” 

“With us,” she says, watching Hawkeye laugh as Erin tugs his hair.

When he does, when he laughs so loudly and ridiculously that it shakes the very heavens, he looks so much younger, and it makes her heart ache.

It hurts her to think she could ever consider him a stranger.

“Peg!” Hawkeye calls, breaking her from her reverie. “Catch!”

And then he tosses Erin, still giggling, to Peg, both of them crashing backwards with a splash.

Erin gives her a sloppy saltwater kiss, and demands. “Again! Throw me again!”

“Alright. Go long, Hawkeye!” she calls, and then heaves Erin into the water like a sack of potatoes.

“Your turn,” BJ says, scooping Peg up as she yelps. “Into the drink!”

Then he’s tossing her into the waves. She comes up for air sputtering with laughter, and tasting salt, pulling BJ down into the water with her, kissing him as they waves crash over them. 

When they drag themselves out of the water, the sun is still high overhead, the four of them eating sand-filled sandwiches that Hawkeye and BJ proclaim to be the best thing they’ve ever tasted.

Remembering the hollow bodies and protruding bones that came home to her, Peggy is inclined to agree.

After they eat, they spend a good chunk of the afternoon building an elaborate sandcastle, before heading back into the waves to rinse off.

They don’t head home until the sun is sinking below the horizon, all of them pink-cheeked, and happily exhausted, crusted with sand as they are.

Hawkeye and BJ read Erin a bedtime story, though she falls asleep before they finish it.

Peg stands in the doorway and watches, after BJ has gone back downstairs, as Hawkeye smoothes a hand over Erin’s hair, and leans down to kiss her forehead. 

“She really is a lot like you,” he says, stopping beside Peg in the doorway. 

“Because she's short? Beautiful? Witty?”

He smiles. “Brave.”

There is no trickster god about him now, but something quieter, just a smile, and a squeeze of her hand, and then he’s gone, without saying good night.

Breakfast the next morning is quiet, and final, because there’s a suitcase waiting by the front door.

“You’ll have to say hi to your dad for me,” Peg says over her coffee.

Hawkeye smiles. “I will. But you know, Peg, you’re gonna have to come out to Maine and say it yourself at some point. What if the airline loses your ‘hi’ on the way home?”

“Is that a formal invitation?”

Hawkeye shrugs, and grins at both of them. “Hey, we’ve shared socks before, what’s a bit of sharing homes?”

“You’ve shared socks?” Peg asks, incredulous.

Hawkeye’s grin grows wider. “If it’s any consolation, Peggy Jane, I’ll share my socks with you too. What’s mine is yours.”

This makes her laugh. “We’ll be sure to visit as soon as we can get away. Even if I have to kidnap BJ here from the hospital.”

“You may have to,” Hawkeye says, leaning in conspiratorially. “He works too hard.”

“He does. We ought to give him a vacation”

“If you two are gonna plot right in front of me…” BJ says, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “And I don’t work too hard.”

Peg and Hawkeye exchange an identical look of skepticism, and laugh, much to BJ’s chagrin.

“We better get going,” BJ says, making a show of checking his watch. “Don’t want to be late.”

“I think what you don’t want is the two of us ganging up on you,” Peggy comments, as Hawkeye laughs. 

They make their way to the front hall, all three of them reluctant.

“You’re always welcome back here,” Peg tells Hawkeye at the front door. “I mean that, darling. Don’t be a stranger.”

“‘Course not,” BJ says. “He’s family.”

“I’m only sorry I don’t have any gifts to send home with you,” Peg says, apologetically.

Hawkeye sets down his suitcase, and smiles down at her. “Don’t worry, Peggy. You’ve given me plenty to take home.”

He leans in to kiss her on the cheek, and then she hugs him, still smelling her own shampoo in his hair, a muttered “thank you” whispered in her ear, before he pulls away.

“Bye, Hawkeye.”

“Bye, Peg.”

She watches him and BJ as they make their way to the car, feeling a sharp ache of loss underneath her breastbone, like a vital spark went out the minute he crossed back over her threshold.

She watches until they’re out of sight, already missing them both.

Hawkeye may have shown up on their doorstep a stranger, but he leaves as a friend.


End file.
